Healthy baby born at Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station to Antioch couple

By Eve MitchellContra Costa Times

Posted:
11/27/2012 09:26:10 AM PST

Updated:
11/27/2012 05:09:49 PM PST

A baby was born at the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station early Monday morning to an Antioch couple just as commuters were arriving for the rush hour.

The mother, Jasmine Osborne, 30, of Antioch, was on her way to Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley with the baby's father, 24-year-old Donyell McCullough, after she started having contractions. The baby then started to emerge, so he quickly pulled off the highway at the Bailey Road exit to the BART station. The baby was born in the van about 6 a.m. in the station's parking lot.

This is the third time a baby was born at a BART station. A baby was born at the San Leandro BART station in 2008, and another was born at a BART station in 2005. To date, only one baby has been born while the mother was riding the train. That happened in 1996 when a mother gave birth to a baby on a train that had stopped at a Hayward station after the train operator was told she had gone into labor.

The Antioch couple's baby girl, named De'Aurie McCullough, weighed in at 7 pounds, 9 ounces. The baby and her parents were taken to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Antioch after the birth.

The couple had left their Antioch home early Monday morning and were driving on westbound Highway 4 near the Bailey Road exit when the baby started to emerge.

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"By the time we pulled into the parking lot, she was already out in the van," Osborne said from her hospital room on Tuesday morning as De'Aurie cried in the background.

"I don't remember too much because I was so much pain. ... (De'Aurie) is healthy. Everything is all right with her," she said of her third child.

At around the time De'Aurie was being delivered at the BART station, two commuting good Samaritans showed up, including one who happened to be a UPS driver.

K.C. Mattox, the UPS driver, and his wife, Tonya, had arrived at the station at 5:53 a.m. from their Pittsburg home for their morning commute into San Francisco.

"We were getting ready to take the 6:02 a.m. BART train to San Francisco, and we were walking in the parking lot, and we see a van screech around the taxi zone," said Tonya Mattox, a manager at the Best Western Tucson Inn in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, another good Samaritan, a taxi driver, had called 911 for help. A 911 dispatcher was giving directions to McCullough to carry out the birth while waiting for paramedics to arrive.

"They said they need to tie up the umbilical cord, and to tie it up does anybody have any shoelaces? I made my husband take his shoelace off," recalled Mattox, who hugged McCullough after the baby was born.

"He gave me the shoelace so I could tie the shoelace around the umbilical card," said McCullough, adding paramedics arrived in time to cut the umbilical cord.

McCullough, who works at his family's restaurant in Patterson, said his grandfather has suggested Freeway as a nickname for De'Aurie, since she was born on the road. "He called and said, 'Where is Freeway,'" McCullough said with laugh.

Mattox said she and her husband relived the experience while on their morning commute into San Francisco. "It was pretty amazing," Mattox said.

And the shoelace her husband took off in furtherance of this memorable event?

"He got off at the BART station in San Francisco, stopped into a Walgreens and got a new pair of shoelaces," she said.